Between 1942 and 1945 the United States brought together the brightest scientists in the country to produce the first atomic bomb. This undertaking, code-named the Manhattan Project, had its roots in a letter written by Albert Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt in the summer of 1939. In the letter Einstein explained the military potential of nuclear fission chain reactions and suggested that it might be in the best interest of the United States to be the first nation to capitalize on this knowledge.
Roosevelt approved research into nuclear fission in February 1940. The initial funding was $6,000, but, in 1942 when the United States entered World War II, the project was placed under the War Department, which would ultimately spend $2 billion building the first atomic bomb.
Concerned that Germany would succeed in developing a bomb of its own, the U.S. researchers quickened their pace, and scientists from Canada and Britain also joined the Project. On a huge, isolated mesa in the mountains of Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Manhattan Project scientists developed a way to make plutonium into pure metal and then turn it into a bomb.
The first bomb, nicknamed "Fat Man", was detonated at Trinity Camp at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. It unleashed the equivalent of between 15,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT, fusing the sand of the surrounding desert into glass and vaporizing the low metal tower in which it had been suspended.
After the blast, the Project team was full of joy: they had solved one of the most perplexing physics problems of their time. But the searing heat and the deadly mushroom cloud were also signs of the complicated tangle of political and ethical problems the atomic bomb would yet create.
